soph (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sophia_sol) wrote2017-12-17 08:28 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2017-12-17 08:28 pm
That Inevitable Victorian Thing, by E.K. Johnston
I picked this book up basically entirely because I was drawn in by the title and the beautiful cover design. And I think I'm glad I read it? It was pretty fun. But I have some major frustrations.
The basic premise is that things went differently in the Victorian era and so the British Empire a) stayed a major Thing into the modern era but b) like, a relatively multicultural and non-patriarchal Thing, at least as colonial empires go. Also there is a genetics-reading computer system that is next-door to God in terms of its power and influence on the Empire.
I enjoyed the worldbuilding for the most part, though I also have questions about aspects of it. I appreciated that the author wasn't trying to make this alternate world a utopia, just a world that is mildly better than ours in certain ways though also perhaps worse in others. But it also just kind of all felt like an excuse to get people dressing up in fancy Victorian-era dresses and going to balls in the modern era. Which I understand the appeal of, but also I don't think that that aspect makes sense given the worldbuilding. Why would the alterations to how the British Empire works make fashion and culture so much more stagnant??
The near deification of the genetics-computer doesn't make any sense either, there's no effort made to explain how this perspective might have come into being in this alternate world, and it bugs me.
Anyways our main characters are:
- Helena, a Canadian girl who's on the poorer side of the aristocracy and is about to have her debut
- Margaret, the crown princess of the Empire, who is pretending to be a random unimportant aristocrat so she can have some freedom and experience of the world on summer vacation in Canada
- August, lifetime best friend of Helena, heir to a Great Lakes shipping company, plans to propose to Helena after Helena's debut (Helena expects and wants this proposal)
Undercover Margaret proceeds to make friends with the other two and fall in love with Helena. Love triangle time!
Earlyish in the book I was rather wishing there was a chance of this ending in poly, thinking poly would fix everything. And then I was surprised to discover it DID end in poly, which should have been exciting, but the way it ended in poly made me MAD. UGH. BETRAYAL.
So first of all it perpetuated the stereotype that poly inevitably involves infidelity. Helena and Margaret get together (with both emotional and physical intimacy) while August is totally unaware that anything's going on and still thinks that he and Helena are an exclusive item. And Helena and Margaret realize what they're doing and keep doing it anyway.
I hate infidelity storylines and the way this whole thing was handled just made me super uncomfortable. I could tell that the reader was supposed to be thinking about how cute Helena and Margaret were together during those scenes but I couldn't focus on that because I was too busy being annoyed at them for their casual betrayal of August.
And then when August DOES figure out what's going on and the three of them finally talk, they agree that the happy ending for the three of them is for Margaret and August to get married and pretend they're a couple, and Helena will be one of Margaret's ladies-in-waiting and will be secretly involved with both Margaret and August.
And this is considered a happy ending for them EVEN THOUGH a running theme in the book has been that all of them have various secrets that have been making them unhappy and they're better off for having shared their secrets. Now they are committing to a very major secret for the rest of their lives!
And the thing is that this is a world that seems to be intended to be less anti-queer than our world. A member of the royal family is in a same-sex marriage! So why can't Margaret decide that this is the time to expand that acceptance into the relationship of the ruler? Why can't Margaret and Helena be the ones to have an acknowledged relationship, instead of the only acknowledged relationship among the three of them be the one that isn't even true?
It just made me really sad that the queer happy ending in this book is PRETEND YOU'RE NOT QUEER FOREVER.
(also one of the main characters turns out to be intersex and it appears that because of the godliness of the genetics-computer being intersex is even more stigmatized than it is in our world so that's....a choice that was made. Probably if you're trans you're pretty fucked too. And also the whole business with the computer making good genetic matches for everyone in the empire made me think super uncomfortably of eugenics. Eurgh.)
The basic premise is that things went differently in the Victorian era and so the British Empire a) stayed a major Thing into the modern era but b) like, a relatively multicultural and non-patriarchal Thing, at least as colonial empires go. Also there is a genetics-reading computer system that is next-door to God in terms of its power and influence on the Empire.
I enjoyed the worldbuilding for the most part, though I also have questions about aspects of it. I appreciated that the author wasn't trying to make this alternate world a utopia, just a world that is mildly better than ours in certain ways though also perhaps worse in others. But it also just kind of all felt like an excuse to get people dressing up in fancy Victorian-era dresses and going to balls in the modern era. Which I understand the appeal of, but also I don't think that that aspect makes sense given the worldbuilding. Why would the alterations to how the British Empire works make fashion and culture so much more stagnant??
The near deification of the genetics-computer doesn't make any sense either, there's no effort made to explain how this perspective might have come into being in this alternate world, and it bugs me.
Anyways our main characters are:
- Helena, a Canadian girl who's on the poorer side of the aristocracy and is about to have her debut
- Margaret, the crown princess of the Empire, who is pretending to be a random unimportant aristocrat so she can have some freedom and experience of the world on summer vacation in Canada
- August, lifetime best friend of Helena, heir to a Great Lakes shipping company, plans to propose to Helena after Helena's debut (Helena expects and wants this proposal)
Undercover Margaret proceeds to make friends with the other two and fall in love with Helena. Love triangle time!
Earlyish in the book I was rather wishing there was a chance of this ending in poly, thinking poly would fix everything. And then I was surprised to discover it DID end in poly, which should have been exciting, but the way it ended in poly made me MAD. UGH. BETRAYAL.
So first of all it perpetuated the stereotype that poly inevitably involves infidelity. Helena and Margaret get together (with both emotional and physical intimacy) while August is totally unaware that anything's going on and still thinks that he and Helena are an exclusive item. And Helena and Margaret realize what they're doing and keep doing it anyway.
I hate infidelity storylines and the way this whole thing was handled just made me super uncomfortable. I could tell that the reader was supposed to be thinking about how cute Helena and Margaret were together during those scenes but I couldn't focus on that because I was too busy being annoyed at them for their casual betrayal of August.
And then when August DOES figure out what's going on and the three of them finally talk, they agree that the happy ending for the three of them is for Margaret and August to get married and pretend they're a couple, and Helena will be one of Margaret's ladies-in-waiting and will be secretly involved with both Margaret and August.
And this is considered a happy ending for them EVEN THOUGH a running theme in the book has been that all of them have various secrets that have been making them unhappy and they're better off for having shared their secrets. Now they are committing to a very major secret for the rest of their lives!
And the thing is that this is a world that seems to be intended to be less anti-queer than our world. A member of the royal family is in a same-sex marriage! So why can't Margaret decide that this is the time to expand that acceptance into the relationship of the ruler? Why can't Margaret and Helena be the ones to have an acknowledged relationship, instead of the only acknowledged relationship among the three of them be the one that isn't even true?
It just made me really sad that the queer happy ending in this book is PRETEND YOU'RE NOT QUEER FOREVER.
(also one of the main characters turns out to be intersex and it appears that because of the godliness of the genetics-computer being intersex is even more stigmatized than it is in our world so that's....a choice that was made. Probably if you're trans you're pretty fucked too. And also the whole business with the computer making good genetic matches for everyone in the empire made me think super uncomfortably of eugenics. Eurgh.)
no subject
no subject